We draw on a detailed grounded theory study of the reactions of Dutch food firms to the recent introduction of genetically modified foods to inductively identify the capabilities that firms develop in response to reputational threats. Central to the view on capabilities we propose are the...

Over the last years, it has become increasingly important for companies to create strategic business alignment (SBA), i.e., the degree to which employees understand, support, and are able to execute the companies’ strategic initiatives. This study provides insights into the way companies can...

This study shows that different types of associations regarding a company have different effects on customers' product evaluations. Associations with a company's ability influenced quality perceptions of products marketed by the company's subsidiaries, but not intentions to actually buy those...

This study presents a method to establish empirically what drives organization members in their day-to-day behavior. The method starts from the sense employees make of their own actions. The approach consists of two steps: qualitative laddering interviews to determine the most central means and...

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate how concentrated owners add value to Asian firms. While prior research suggests that relational owners (i.e., business groups, top management team, board, government, banks, families, and corporation) may help firms fill institutional voids,...

To date, the field of non-market strategy has little to offer in the way of an integrated perspective on the simultaneous management of strategic issues and corporate stakeholders. This paper employs social network analysis to make a number of theoretically grounded conjectures about the...

Dysfunctional auditor behaviors (DABs), defined as all acts or omissions by auditors that negatively affect audit quality and reduce the reliability of audit-based opinions, have proven an endemic and persistent feature of the contemporary business environment. Although the dominant response to...

Our current views of economic competition are still rooted in the imagery of the isolated firm that transacts with its buyers, suppliers, and competitors via largely anonymous factor and product markets. Yet this view is fundamentally at odds with the growing importance of business groups in the...

Some centers of gravity are finally emerging in the field of business ethics after a decades-long search for action-guiding theories. Amongst the foremost of these are contractualism and virtue ethics. The former focuses on the morals of economic exchange, the latter on the moral qualities of...

Integrative Social Contracts Theory (ISCT) is arguably the most promising theory of business ethics to date, but is often criticized for its inability to produce substantive, action guiding norms. The gist of the problem is that the contractualist argument central to this theory may justify many...